Marketing orientation (Fromm)
One of Fromm's non-productive character orientations, alongside the receptive, exploitative and hoarding types. The person experiences themselves as a commodity whose value depends on what they would fetch on the personality market, so they become whatever is in demand and their worth tracks their saleability.
What drives it
It turns identity into adaptability and spares the person the question of who they are. The cost is emptiness and chronic anxiety, because the market sets the price and can drop it at any time.
How it shows
Work
Rebrands with every hiring cycle; the LinkedIn self is the real self; opinions track the audience. Excellent in interviews and hard to know after a year. Talks about 'my personal brand' and 'positioning', and values work for what it signals rather than what it is.
Relationships
Chooses partners for how they look on paper; shows a different self to each circle; can't say what they like without reference to what's admired.
Self
You check how something will look before you know whether you want it, and your mood drops when nobody is watching.
What tells it apart
Self-monitoring: High self-monitors adjust to situations as a skill and can keep a stable inner view; in the marketing orientation nothing stable sits under the adjustment. Ask what they believe when nobody's watching.
Persona: The persona is a necessary social mask over a real self; the marketing orientation is when the mask has become the self.
Contingent self-worth: Contingent worth can attach to any domain, including virtue or competence; the marketing orientation is specifically worth as exchange value in other people's eyes.
A test
Ask what they value about themselves that nobody would pay for; a marketing-oriented person struggles, or answers with marketable traits.
Questions to carry
- Of the things valued in themselves, which would nobody pay for, and how hard are they to name?
- Whose market am I shaping myself for right now, and what do I hide because it wouldn't sell?
How strong the research is
weak. A social-character type never validated as such; adjacent research finds that pursuing image and popularity goals, and staking self-worth on others' approval, predicts lower wellbeing (Kasser and Ryan, from 1993; Crocker and colleagues, 2003).
Where it comes from
Erich Fromm, Man for Himself, 1947
Sources
- Erich Fromm, Man for Himself (1947)